


A Story in Sevens

by raedbard



Category: The West Wing
Genre: Community: tww_minis, Gen, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2008-05-02
Updated: 2008-05-02
Packaged: 2017-10-07 00:18:06
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,257
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59294
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/raedbard/pseuds/raedbard
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>A life in seven year intervals.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Story in Sevens

**Author's Note:**

> WARNINGS for: homophobic violence, self-injury, and suicide. Set from three to fifty years post-canon.

a.

When Huck is seven years old, he runs away in a rainstorm.

It is raining. A real storm, like gravel being thrown against the windows, obscuring the houses over in the next street, forming a series of small, shining rivers alongside the sidewalk. There is no lightning yet but there is thunder, drumming low on the boundary of Huck's hearing, giving him the first hints of a headache. He stands with his hands palms-up against the window, cold glass and his breath, steam, and the taste of condensation on his tongue.

"You're not going out there," his father says, coming to stand behind him as quiet as ghost, his fingers applying small points of pressure to Huck's back, "Are you?"

"No, dad."

"We'll go out when the rain gets a bit less, okay?"

"Yeah."

"Sail your ... boat. Thing. And never tell your mother about us fooling around in the no doubt very unsanitary water."

Huck smiles, against the window. "Yeah."

His father leans forward, slips a hand around Huck's waist, kisses the round of the back of his head. His warmth is a contrast to the freeze of the window and Huck closes his eyes as their bodies meet, and notices that all the small hairs along the line of his neck are erect. Outside the rivers are becoming thicker, spreading across the street, washing debris down to the storm drains, on an impossible adventure. His father's hand has risen to Huck's shoulder and gives it a squeeze before he drifts away, still silent, trusting.

Huck waits perhaps ten or fifteen minutes before he leaves, waits for even the echo of his father's presence to have disappeared. There is no-one else in the house today - his mother and sister are in Baltimore, trying to get Molly some new tap shoes, probably just getting soaked - and his father is writing, working, and will be only half-aware of the passage of time and the emptiness of the house. He won't miss Huck until it is already too late.

Outside it seems to him that the sky has become black enough to get lost in and that the rain will cover the sound of his steps. He doesn't know why he wants to run in the rain, up to his knees in the splash of the water, half a second from slipping and breaking his neck, only that something in the dark sky called out to him.

Sunday, so there are less cars in the street. Parked they are like drums for the rain, hoods vibrating with the half-pound drops of water. Huck slows his run to watch the impossible trajectories of the droplets, bounced off at strange angles. He grins, feeling too fast for the rain to catch, racing up the long rise of hill which leads away from the house, across to the park, out into the woods that form the southern boundary of his recognisable world. It is these dark trees he is making for, he thinks; that is where he would like to sit out the rain, water dripping for his hair into his eyes, into his mouth, pressed up against the trunk of an old tree. Against a tree, solid and almost-warm, like his father's chest.

It is at least an hour, by his imperfect internal clock, before his father finds him.

Toby is wet through and has patches of high, frantic, colour across his cheekbones. Huck notices how the rain has flattened out his hair, making his head seem a new, odd shape. He has no idea how he was found, what tracks he left, only that he trusted and that it worked. Though Huck is partly hidden by rain and the unruly vegetation of the darkening wood, Toby dashes straight for him, as though pulled by an invisible thread.

He catches Huck up in both his big hands and clutches him tight, then shakes him, then pulls him close against his chest and hugs him hard. Huck feels dizzy, almost sick. As though all the blood has rushed up into his head and left the rest of him disconnected. "What the ... where did you go? Where did you go?" his dad says, into his ear, a slow unhappy whisper. His father smells of the trees and the rain, there is water in his beard.

"I went for a walk."  
"What kind of answer is that, Huck?"  
Huck presses his head closer to Toby's shoulder.  
"I thought you'd gone," Toby says, in a voice which sounds strange to his son. "I -I thought you'd gone."

Huck nestles into the warmth of Toby's body and closes his eyes.

_No, daddy, no no no._

If it was all a test, then Toby has passed: full marks, the top of the class. His frantic breathing, the sweat which is just warmer than the rain at the base of his neck, the hand that presses Huck's head deep into his shoulder, all betray a scholar of Huck's needs and a crusader for his safety. And for the moment, that knowledge - or a reiteration of something he has written always in bright letters in his heart - is enough. But, later, Huck thinks perhaps he has not passed himself. The impulse to run, the desire to stand and disappear in the rain or sink beneath the earth has not lessened. His concern now is that it never will.

b.

When Huck is fourteen years old he kisses his best friend.

Jamie Walter Whitman, whose studious and to Huck deeply distressing avoidance of poetry all stems from issues with his middle and last names, is the handsomest kid in the class. Whether or not the class know it or remotely agrees is of no consequence to Huck. He has known Jamie since they were both nine years old and has thought him beautiful and terrible and wonderful for the last three. If Jamie shuns poetry, then Huck will write some for him, secretly, but patient and true. He is still young enough, sweet enough, to hope.

Huck has been aware of his homosexuality since before he knew what it would mean for him once he grew older; knowing only that male figures (in comicbooks, in cartoons, in the books he reads and the dreams he has) cast long shadows in his mind. They stay with him, like friends. He thought, for a little while and once he knew the term, that it was maybe only hero-worship, a stage to be got through before he can really be like the kids in the stories, going slow for him because he _is_ slow and unsure, nervous; exactly the sort of boy who needs a role-model. But then there was Jamie (observances of the way his hair moved in a breeze and how sharp and straight his shoulders are, followed with blushes and daydreams and other things he knows are perfectly natural, even if it did freak him out a lot the first time) and Huck got over his denial pretty quickly.

He isn't sure anyone knows, or even suspects, that he is the sort of boy who falls in love with other boys. He catches a glimmer of what might be understanding in his father's eyes sometimes but there have never been any words put around that knowledge. Huck is content. He accepts, as he accepted slow Saturday mornings at the Synagogue as a means of defining himself, that this is how it will be.

*

Out in the Bay, on an afternoon just prior to Huck's fourteenth birthday, the gulls are singing.

They are sitting side by side, dangling sneakers and not bare feet in the water, not talking. Jamie's thigh is pressed up close to Huck's. He is still slim now, with the suggestion of long muscles gaining prominence in his legs and arms, but Huck believes (in the corners of his heart which have worked these things out and take a painful kind of pleasure in the process) that he will not stay so. Jamie runs, plays football. Even boxes, occasionally, though he wasn't meant to say so, even to Huck.

Huck sighs and allows his body to curve against his friend's, as though he is about to fall asleep. Jamie stills, suddenly, everything in him becoming a line of excruciating tension, tingling on Huck's skin like the water from shower when the thermostat is set too high. Huck closes his eyes.

Then, an arm slips around his waist. Clumsy, the hand trying not to seek but finding anyway, caught for a few breath-stopping moments in the tail of Huck's shirt. Jamie's fingers brush his bare skin and Huck swallows, carefully, sure that Jamie will hear it. They sit quietly for a few minutes.

"Birthday soon," Jamie says, evidently uncomfortable with the verb which might lead to him being pinned down to a promise. Huck smiles.

"Yeah."

"I'm not getting you anything."

Huck laughs, letting the sound disappear under the cry of a gull. Jamie's shoulder is hard and uncomfortable, but he doesn't want to leave it yet.

"My dad's getting me books."

"He always gets you books. You could open a library."

"I think that's what he wants."

Then Jamie chuckles. He and Toby, much to Huck's astonishment, have found that they like each other very much. Jamie has even made Huck's father laugh, a short sweet bullet of sound, which made a tear in the air of that visit, and let in some sun. It's not like Toby laughs that often, and Huck would love Jamie just for that even were there nothing else to recommend him.

"I could get you a book," Jamie says, ponderingly.

"Have to learn to read the titles first. And we don't have that kind of time."

Jamie's fingers jab into Huck's side and Huck springs back from him, a small yell of pain mixing with a laugh that is just a few measures short of hysterical. Jamie raises his eyebrow, smirking.

"Nerd," he says.

"Jock."

"Freakish word genius."

"What?" Huck says, laughing.

"You heard," Jamie says, grinning.

"That doesn't actually count as an insult."

"Yeah, we'll see about that, my friend."

"Okay."

"Okay."

Huck shuffles closer again, puts his head back on Jamie's shoulder. He closes his eyes and hears Jamie sigh, a long sigh, disconsolate.

"What?" Huck asks.

"I'll get you something better than a book."

"Okay."

"Okay."

*

At midnight, on the night Huck turns fourteen, there is a rattle of stone against glass at his window: Jamie, beckoning. Huck races, as silently as a boy of fourteen can, down the stairs, to the door, hisses at Jamie to shut up and what the hell is he doing anyway?

Jamie is smiling, dressed all in black. He seems taller and older in the half-light from the street lamps. He beckons from across the street.

"What the hell is -- "

"Shut up. Just, shut up."

His mouth is against Huck's is sudden, soft, warm, and not describable in terms any more poetic than those, or not yet. One touch, another, and another. Jamie opens his mouth first knowing, somehow, that Huck doesn't dare to. His tongue tastes of what might be beer, but even that can't kill the magic. The night deepens and all Huck can process is the sound of his heartbeat and Jamie's strong fingers in his hair.

There are no lights on in the house when Huck wanders, dizzily, back through his front door. But his father's voice booms, if quietly, in the darkness.

"Happy birthday, kid." Toby's tone is dry, shading to sardonic.

"Dad, I -- "

But his dad's hand is gentle on Huck's head.

"Back to bed, kiddo."

"Thanks, dad."

"Any serious talks, should they take place at all, will be scheduled for the morning."

"Okay."

"Okay."

c.

When Huck is twenty-one years old he graduates from Columbia University magna cum laude with a double major in English and history.

He spends most of the day with his father, like a long goodbye to this time that was theirs. Commencement is a ritual Huck would rather not participate in and Toby is, mostly, happy to shield him from one last responsibility and keep him hidden on the parts of campus where no-one is looking, walking slowly over the few fallen leaves and watching spring become summer. Huck ought to have been salutatorian at least, but deliberately dropped a grade in his least favourite class when he realised it was becoming a distinct possibility. He has the feeling that his father wanted to express disapproval for that stunt, but couldn't quite make himself.

Their fingers touch as they walk, not holding hands but not wanting to part either.

It is fair to say that Huck chose Columbia for entirely unscholarly reasons. There were other offers from other colleges - better colleges even - and no shortage of money for his support, but Huck doesn't think anyone was surprised that he chose the university at which his father is a Professor of Political Science and a minor god to the small bunch of kids who are still interested in protest and left-leaning politics. Huck chose the college where it would be feasible for him to crash at his father's apartment and go to movies with him on Saturday afternoons and to Temple with him on Saturday mornings. Where it was possible to hide from the endless nightmare which is the city of New York in a quiet, oddly familiar place, which smells of cigar smoke.

For the first year, that was exactly what had happened. They formed the closest orbit of each other's worlds, contented, almost like a couple, re-learning the things they didn't realise they had forgotten. More than once Huck falls asleep watching CNN on his father's couch and wakes in the morning to find a blanket thrown over him and a page torn from a reporter's notebook: _gone to get coffee, back soon, love dad_. And those are the moments (the only ones he remembers in retrospect) when he is happy: an ache palliated, or at least matched like for like.

This first year is the one where he begins to write poetry too. He spends weeks agonising over whether it is a good idea to show it to his father, the speech-writer, the crafter of fine sentences, who has been raising his eyebrows over the mistakes and ill-chosen phraseology in Huck's compositions since he was six years old. But it is little use to hide the rising excitement he is getting from the work; the almost joyful audacity he feels when he is in the middle of a piece. And eventually, Toby asks.

"It's a thing," Huck says.

"A thing?"

"Yeah."

"Elaboration?"

"It's ... something I wrote."

"Okay."

"It's ... poetry. That I wrote."

"Okay."

"That's all you're going to say? 'Okay'?"

"Well I haven't actually seen it yet."

"You don't think it's ... I don't know. You don't think it's kinda flaky? I mean, poetry?"

"No, I don't."

"Even though you haven't read it yet?"

"Huck."

"Okay, alright."

"Genetics is on your side here son. One of the few times we can say that."

"But you've never written poetry."

"How do you know that?"

"You have?"

"Maybe."

"Will you show me?"

"Maybe."

"No, you don't get to be coy, dad."

"It's not a trade, Huck. You came to me."

"You're the only one I could have come to."

"Yeah."

"Have you ... have you ever shown anyone?"

"No."

"Not even mom?"

"Definitely not."

"Or Sam?"

"No."

"Will you show me?"

"Yes."

Later there were new friends, sex, and a single violent fight which split them apart, but those are the things Huck tries hard not to remember as they walk across the grass. Toby's hand reaches out for his, closes round it in a warm embrace. His eyes are sorrowful but he smiles anyway: a smile in which Huck can see the cracks.

Huck throws himself into his father's arms, like a little boy again, at the same moment that the long cheer goes up from the stands and over Toby's shoulder, Huck sees a thousand black caps darkening the sky.

d.

When Huck is twenty-eight years old he is admitted to hospital having run his fist through a plate glass window.

It's the night of the poetry launch. Molly has brought him a freshly rented tuxedo which despite the assurances of the hire firm, still stinks of the sweat of the last poor idiot who had to wear it. Huck's gut is giving him trouble enough and he stands for a few very long minutes at his open window, breathing in the cold February air. He wonders if his dad ever had this trouble.

This is the night that his first book of poetry is to be published.

A slim volume of what Huck still thinks of as juvenilia, not more than fifty pages. But the agent he acquired a year ago is already writing rave reviews in her head and it is Huck who has to give the gentle reminder that poetry never really sells. _It sells fine if it's good_, was her reply; _and this is better than good_. It worries him slightly that she can bear to speak to anyone with sentences as clumsy as those and he doesn't bother to point out that even in New York he barely sees one new volume of poetry a week on display in the stores. Even he, as a poet, doesn't own more than twenty collections by people who haven't been dead at least twenty years.

Outside it has started to snow. Huck sighs and watches his breath form white clouds in the air.

"They probably won't lynch you. Probably it'll be more champagne and fiddly hors d'oeuvres."

Molly is his date for tonight. She looks beautiful and confident in a cream silk gown and a dark blue wrap. She has been sitting delicately on his bed for the last half an hour, waiting for his nerves to settle and the cab to arrive. Huck isn't sure which will happen first. He shuts the window and turns to her.

"Will you please stop sitting there looking smug?"

"I'm _happy_ for you. I'm being _supportive_."

"You'll be sorry when I puke in your lap in the cab."

Molly laughs. "Just smile a lot and be really vague when you answer questions. They'll love you."

"Yeah."

"Want to take a bet on what percentage of the reviews _don't_ mention dad?"

Huck laughs. She gets up off the bed, links her arm with his.

"It'll be fine. Really."

He nods. "Yeah. I know."

*

It is somewhere within the third hour that Huck becomes aware that he is curling his left hand in and out of a fist. There are more people here than those who have come to see him (he estimates their number at no greater than six, including Molly) and the shop-floor of the Barnes and Noble where the launch is taking place has become dense with bodies. The air is too hot and the noise too much. He has somehow got through three glasses of champagne without remembering to eat a corresponding amount of fiddly hors d'oeuvres and is consequently light-headed and feeling slightly sick. The voices press on him - heavy, dull sound which is giving him a headache; their talk interrupting the thoughts in his own head like a short circuit.

He is stumbling outside through a back door before he realises what he is doing, out into fresh air still bitter with snow. He is hauling in huge breaths, trying to fill up his lungs right to their edges as though this will somehow keep off the vast wave of panic and the corresponding surges of fury which are rising in him.

He stands bent over with his hands on his knees, gasping, losing awareness of anything beyond the small patch of greyed snow on which he is standing. A car passes, another. Huck hears an ugly laugh and then,

"Don't barf on your nice shoes, dude!"

"_Fucking_ rich boy."

"Not having a real good night, rich boy?"

"You want us to show you a good time, man? Show you how the good guys party?"

The car has halted. Huck hears the doors open, without raising his eyes from the snow. He isn't surprised when he feels a sharp shove in his ribs, which unbalances his already shaky ability to stand and knocks him to the sidewalk. He wonders, briefly, sardonically, whether he just looks gay; such a homo that he cannot but invite a quick punch to the face.

"Or you're just too queer, man? You don't wanna have a good time with guys like us, no?"

Huck manages a smile at that. He doesn't lose it until they begin kicking him.

He does try fighting back, throwing out a kick and a punch where he can, but there are four of them and he's drunk and scared and probably going to throw up on one of them before they're done. Pretty soon he just curls up into as tight a ball as he can and waits for them to stop.

They lose interest rapidly when a door close to the one Huck came through opens, spilling yellow light on the snow. The one who spoke first aims a last slap at Huck's face, then pushes his head down into the snow, ruffles his hair and then runs for the car. Huck lies still for a few minutes, waiting to see if any of the pain will subside, tempted by the whisper in his body which is telling him to sleep. But he gets up, holding his left hand to his head, blinking back the darkness that is filling his eyes. Headrush. He staggers a little, almost falls over again. Everything hurts. He is crying from the pain and angry because he is crying, because he lay there and took it, because he was such an easy target to begin with. He coughs - a long bark of sound rolling up from his lungs. He spits blood on the snow: white on grey. It is this, strangely, which raises his fury.

He walks up close to the back wall of the store building, stands beside the dumpster, breathing heavily in and out, with his forehead against the brick, trying to make the flood of anger subside. But as he quickens his breathing the air catches in his throat, forcing out another cough which makes the pain in his ribs burst.

He doesn't realise there is even a window there until his fist has punched through it. He listens to the collapse of the glass and closes his eyes, fighting the urge to cry again. He realises he probably ought to run, just like those guys. But his legs won't work that well.

He walks as well as he can around to the front of the store with his left hand cradled, bleeding heavily, in his right and waits for his sister to come out.

*

"Jesus, Huck."

"I know."

"I think you're gonna soak through these bandages."

"Sorry."

"Why did you wait, for chrissakes?"

"I couldn't ... I couldn't go back in there. Not like this."

"I made a woman buy your book."

"Thank you."

"Shut up." Molly sighs out a long exhalation. "So, you wanna go to the ER? Don't bother saying no because I'm taking you anyway. You're ... such a jerk sometimes."

Huck doesn't say anything. His hand is going slowly numb. Whether that is to do with the alcohol or with severed nerves, Huck is not sure. Molly's face is dark with the approach of thunder, not yet hurt because she is too busy being angry; putting off understanding until she has put him back together again. The blood is staining the cuffs off the rented tux and his best dress shirt. It is drying around the rims of his fingernails.

"Don't tell dad, okay?" Huck says, slowly and as evenly as he can.

"Okay to tell mom? Or is it just the important part of our parental unit that gets kept in the dark here?"

"Mol."

"No, fuck you. Huck. Just please, shut up and let me get this bandage on, okay?"

"Yeah."

She doesn't start blinking back tears until they've seen the doctor at the ER, who gently removes Molly's attempts at bandaging and sutures the long gash and a few its less serious companions quickly and, for the most part, painlessly. Seven stitches in all. The doctor doesn't ask Huck any questions though Huck gets the feeling he asks Molly a few, when he is out of the room.

It's his left hand, so she can still hold tight to the right as they walk through the slush and gentle snowfall, trying to get a cab.

When they get back to Huck's place it is past two o'clock in the morning. He is so tired, light-headed, starting to ache not only in his hand but throughout his body: his ribs, his stomach, the bright stripe of pain across the side of his face. Everywhere they hit him. She is quiet, subdued. She kisses his cheek tenderly as they say goodbye at the door.

_Take care, you idiot._   
_'Night, Mol._

In the end no-one is told anything and he and Molly never speak of it again. The scar runs the width of Huck's left hand and curls around his pinkie finger, ending in an ugly knot close to the nail. No-one notices it as any different from the black eye he has from the assault or the three bruised ribs or the cut in his cheek. No-one who matters ever says anything at all.

e.

When Huck is thirty-five years old he falls in love.

Lewis is, of all things for this liberal Jewish boy to attach himself to, a staffer in the Department of Defense and an ex-Army boy. A man who is required to pin medals to the chest of his full dress uniform should he ever visit the White House. He isn't a Republican, because that would be going too far, but sometimes Huck teases him that he might as well be. He is dark and stocky and kind and his voice, which is a very ordinary mid-range tenor, has made Huck want to do things he wouldn't be happy about admitting in public. They agree on their definitions very quickly and not much more than three months have passed before Lewis shares Huck's bed full-time and is there first thing in the morning and last thing at night. It is love, and Huck cannot quite believe his good fortune.

Their courtship is, as most of Huck's love affairs seem to be, the story of a book.

He had begun the novel in the Spring of the year his father died - last year, before denial had really departed and he still believed that Toby would be around to read his first draft. He wasn't even halfway through when a final heart attack finally cast away that anchor and Huck was glad that he was writing, bound up with something taut and intricate, because he had feared then that he would go mad.

Instead the book had become the mad thing, twisting itself around every one of Huck's thoughts, conscious and unconscious, voluntary and not. He carried it around in an old messenger bag, scribbled into nine thick notebooks in handwriting that he can hardly read. He took it out whenever a dim collection of points or instincts became a real sentence, an image around which the story can bend.

He had been in Starbucks one day, desperately trying to wrangle poetry into prose, had pushed the notebook hard away from him in frustration and despair, convinced that he'd never make a decent book out of the thing, and spilled the cold congealing vanilla latte he had forgotten he had left next to his elbow all across his own notebook and the folded copy of the _New York Times_ resting in front of the stranger he hadn't even noticed had taken the seat beside him. The coffee makes a slow drip-drip, running off the table to the floor and Huck closes his eyes, waits for an explosion.

But it had never come. The guy had pushed his chair back, deftly, thereby mostly avoiding the spray of the coffee and had seemed more worried about the spread of the stuff over Huck's notebooks than himself.

"Can I buy you a new one of those?" he had said, half amused, half concerned.

Huck had blushed, uncontrollably. Lewis said later that this had been how he knew.

"Er, only if I can buy you a new _Times_."

"It's not a great read today. They didn't have the _New Yorker_."

Huck, looking at a man in an immaculate black suit with a crewcut that emphasises the line of the back of his neck and a bearing full of coiled potential, doesn't even think before he says, "You read the _New Yorker_?"

The man had laughed. It was more like a short, sweet, bark of sound. Huck had blushed all over again, unable to figure out why he felt it necessary to be so rude to this guy he had just poured latte all over. But the guy had just continued mopping up the coffee with his napkins, taking special care with the pages of Huck's notebook. Still smiling.

"Sure I read it. You don't?"

"I do, actually."

"I thought you probably did."

"I read ... I read the short fiction."

The man had looked up at him - brown eyes, black hair that Huck had already wanted to touch, a strong chin, white teeth - and smiled. "Yes. You're a writer, aren't you?"

"You have a lot of writers spill coffee on you that you can tell this?"

"No, you're my first."

Huck had tried for a smile then. "Okay."

"I'm Lewis, it's nice to meet you. Coffee and all."

He had held out a hand, Huck had taken it and been unsurprised by the strength in his grip.

"Huck."

"Look, you want to get out of here? Cause chaos in all new places?"

Huck had nodded, completely unable to stop being swept away by what he's pretty sure, even with his meagre understanding of such things, was a very assured and not a little curtailed pick-up. "Sure."

"Okay."

"Okay."

The day had ended back at Huck's apartment, with Huck pushed up against his own front door with his legs wrapped tight around Lewis, quickly losing clothes and composure, being bruised by the strength of Lewis's attentions and then having his bruises softly kissed and caressed, until he started begging for release. Lewis had held him tightly, one arm under his thigh and the other around his waist, and fucked him, with care and deliberation, so that Huck's communications had been reduced to helpless whimpers, coming hard and fast, holding on to this stranger, crying, full of a grief the book had contained, now all shattered into pieces, now something to be shared.

Lewis had asked, afterwards, and Huck had told him everything, much more than he need have done. And Lewis had nodded, silently, and taken hold of Huck's hand, like a lover he had always had. He had interrupted Huck's apologies with kisses and told him not to be such an idiot.

_You lost someone. You lost your father; you don't apologise to me.  
Thank you.  
I think ... I think you're beautiful.  
I think you're crazy.  
I read your story. In the magazine. I knew you.  
Don't go.  
I won't. I won't._

Huck is sitting at the desk by the window, a laptop open in front of him and the last of his notebooks turned to its last pages by his elbow. The book is a single file now, almost fifty thousand words in length, but not even half done. Huck taps his fingers against the table and tries to find the strength to form the next sentence, the one after that.

He's staring at a particularly difficult paragraph when a kiss comes to the back of his head.

"I made you coffee."

"Thanks. Sorry - did I wake you?"

"No. S'okay."

Huck turns in his chair, pulls Lewis close to him, arms around his waist and head on his chest. He sighs. Lewis kisses the crown of his head again.

"Not going well?"

"It's ... fine. Just slow."

"Drink your coffee."

"Yeah."

Lewis strokes Huck's cheek, then as Huck looks up at him bends to kiss his mouth. Huck closes his eyes, smiles against the kiss. One year today, though neither of them have yet let on that they remember the anniversary. He will probably find some small treasure hidden somewhere later, has hidden one himself. They won't talk about it. They won't need to. They don't need to anymore: love is like telepathy, safe and understood, never lacking.

_I can't believe I get to keep you.  
You do. I promise._

Huck gives his madness to the unmarked pages of an unfinished book, and his peace to a kind dark-haired man, who does not ask for anything more.

f.

When Huck is forty-two years old he publishes his first novel.

They bind it in black, with white lettering forming the title on the cover in a font he thinks is an elaboration of Trebuchet. Huck holds the little volume (two hundred and sixty-seven pages) in his hands and wonders how he did it.

It is about a father and a son, of course. And Huck is aware that the people who know him will not need a better interpretation than those plain points and that interviewers will supply their own. Seeing it finished - white pages on which there is none of the furious pencilled annotation he has become accustomed to laying over the sentences which make up the story - is a little like mysteriously losing the ability to speak. When Molly calls him with congratulations he has to think for what seems like enormous stretches of time before he can give her any kind of reply. He finds it tiring even to open his mouth. All his words missing, waiting to return from that story and be somehow recycled into the everyday.

Huck hopes this new inclination towards muteness disappears before the first round of publicity. He is quite terrified enough about that.

He has a little more than two weeks between the day on which a couriered copy of his book arrived at his door and the day he has to go the Barnes and Noble in Chelsea to talk about it. He spends it, mostly, with breaks to obtain food, coffee, a quick shower - all the requisites - curled up on his couch, which catches the morning sun over Brooklyn, re-reading the book.

It takes him at least two read-throughs to realise why there is so much quietude in his thoughts, now, and so much noise in the thoughts of the characters in the book. The end of their story is a break: a cessation of madness. All the eddies of grief and anger and furious love trapped there; the tightening of Huck's life around a central point: the missing part of the world, never to be found again, except in the pages of a book.

He does not know, or has forgotten, how to be this silent. Nothing in his mind but a distant buzz of static. He is tired, empty. He is alone now, and grief seems distant - just a piece of him quietly excised when he wasn't looking.

He closes his eyes and tries to remember a particular picture of his father. Black and white, taken outside. He looks entirely caught by surprise, even though, as Huck recalls, it was a staged photo - to be used as a book jacket portrait, like the one Huck had taken a few months ago. He hadn't smiled, of course, and the expression in his eyes was a mixture of deep sarcasm and latent fear, of what Huck was never sure. Perhaps of this very thing: being put on record as a different kind of writer; the kind which, Huck thinks, he was never really comfortable to be.

They never talked much about the writing. Toby seldom shared his own struggles with it and, whenever he did, did not share them with Huck but with Sam Seaborn, who occasionally sent fat letters to the apartment in New York when Huck was a senior in college which Huck would long to open but never did. His father did not share their contents and seemed to prefer, as Huck does himself, to suffer the mysterious agonies of composition alone. Perhaps because they wrote for different reasons: Huck because he can't help it, but Toby because there was nothing left to do but write towards that legacy, still left wanting. Yet Huck wishes, inasmuch as he can wish anything in this state of numb passivity, that they had gone some way down that single dark road together, so that maybe Huck would be able to remember, now that he needs it, some snatch of advice or consolation. Something his father said that would seem like the revelation of fate to him now. A lifeboat in a raging ocean.

Huck sighs. Keeps on turning the pages of the book. Not yet weary enough to say: put it down, put everything down and sleep; sleep without knowing the time to wake. He keeps on reading, acting it out in his head, rehearsing. But he doesn't cry at the sad parts, or laugh at his own jokes, or feel as he remembers having felt when he first wrote it, the release of a terrible need: a longing finally shaped into words and therefore, comprehensible. He doesn't feel that understanding now. Now there are more only blank pages multiplying in his mind, waiting to be filled, troubling him to reach for the same old hurts.

_Daddy, I miss you. Please come home._

g.

When Huck is forty-nine years old he takes a long walk over the Brooklyn Bridge.

He has never been able to love the city as his father did: finds that the noise in the streets forms a disconsolate raging in his head; that the skyscrapers cut out the light without compensating him with an onslaught of beauty and awe. He finds that he looks mostly at his feet as he walks in the city, getting obsessed with cracks and litter and imperfections; the unhappiness of the city written over the sidewalk.

When these feelings become too much, when everything in his brain has been reduced to a long homesick scream for the salt air and calm water of Chesapeake Bay, he reads again his father's poetry. His father's love songs about New York, waiting for him in a simply bound paperback volume of no more than forty pages. Not all the poems are about the city. Some are about Huck's mother, some about Huck himself. Still others are to honour the memory of a man now long-dead, who took a long time to recognise small acts of heroism; whom his father never thought not to love. But this is a late volume, the penultimate collection of pages to which Huck's father put his name, and so most of the pieces are about the city. Brooklyn in the main, but also Manhattan and the long, slow story of the Hudson river, which flows through his father's work as an unacknowledged muse.

Huck finds that the words, which are seldom fancy, seldom polysyllabic, calm him. They make him see the beauty in the city which nothing else can. And yet they also awaken the certainty that he should have tried harder to love that which meant so much to the one man in Huck's life who has managed to keep his place on his pedestal. He ought to feel this place in his bones and skin, in his heart, as he does his Jewishness, as he does his own facile gift for putting one word after another. He used to think he hated New York, and then convinced himself that he was in love with it: with the possibilities of a city like this one, and that the anxious clenching of his fists as he walked out into the streets was his own failing, and not New York's at all. But as desperation to love has turned to hurt and to despair, he has had to admit that he will never love this city like his father did. And that seems worse than any other thing.

The Bridge - a structure which he can see, as his father could, from the window in his apartment which serves the little room he uses for writing in - is not crowded today. It is early on Saturday morning, and in an hour he should be at Temple. But he is having trouble with the concept of any stretch of time which is not this minute, this moment.

He puts one foot in front of the other slowly, as though measuring out a distance with his steps. He ignores the woman who turns and stares at him as he passes her. He remembers the road for another time, should he need to return here.

That night he dreams about a rainstorm and his father's arms holding him so tight that it is difficult to breathe. He wakes up and instantly finds himself taking a huge inhalation, as though he has been drowning. His bedroom is hot, stuffy, and he gets up to open a window. Outside there is hazy yellow light and the noise of car horns and people's screams, whether of horror or delight, Huck cannot tell. But he stands with his head thrust out into the open air for a few minutes, trying not to let his gaze fall inexorably downwards, towards the dark sidewalk. He feels the temptation like a drag around his neck, like something heavy, as yet suspended in the air.

He closes his eyes and leans against the windowpane, allowing his face to crumple with tension; almost crying with the weight of his lethargy. It begins to rain lightly.

It is fifteen years ago, not to the day but close enough, that his father died. A man by then much too old, much too broken. As though death had forgotten him and gathered him up quickly, all in the space of a few days. He had confessed to Huck, on the last day but one, that he had never imagined lasting this long (his words) and Huck had held on, so tight, to his hand.

And now Huck really is crying, stupidly, ridiculously, but uncontrollably. He can still feel the press of his father's fingertips at the pressure points in his back. Still feels, sometimes - at these times - that low-level ache for him, which never really went away and can never now be assuaged.

The next morning, a bright crisp Sunday, Huck begins another walk. It begins on the path which runs the length of the Brooklyn Bridge; he does not know where it finishes.

*

On Huck's fiftieth birthday, on a bright morning in May, reports of his death keep appearing on the news. They are making little cracks appear in the fabric of his sister's world: every time she hears his name in the mouth of some stranger, who never saw her brother's quicksilver smile or the broadness of his back as he bent over his work, like stone, like mountains. It takes a lot to make Molly cry, but she doesn't feel like faking bravery today. Keeps thinking about the erosion of rock-faces, of how in enough time every strong thing is withered, of how his face had looked so much like dad's the last time she saw him. Rounded, shadowed cheekbones she wanted to touch, stubble darkening into a real beard. And a shocking sadness in his eyes.

At the launch for the new book, the third. The last now, she supposes. Huck in a suit, looking intensely uncomfortable and lonely, for a man standing at the centre of a group of fifteen people who all think he's as close as they're going to get (this week at least) to God made manifest. He had been shifting, this way and that, as though he was thinking about making a break for it. She had smiled at him over their heads, caught his eye. Let him know that she thinks all this is ridiculous frivolity, _for goodness sake, Huck_. Then grinned. His smile was slow that time, crashing over his face like a wave, sweet and heavy. Happy, almost.

Not happy enough.

She tries to think about him drowning, or the explosive shock of the water hitting his body as he fell. Such a showy way to die. She can hear people whispering that, in their thoughts, behind their sympathies. She wants to slap them. She wants to slap him.

She doesn't remember her uncle David, though she remembers her father speak about him. Always in a hush, always stuttering over the details, never very forthcoming with those anyway. Eventually she'd asked her mom, and been made to promise not to ask daddy about it, not now, honey. She remembers a flash of anger in her father's voice, talking about David with mom, the same year they thought he was going to perform his own act of abandonment. She is sitting on the stairs in her pyjamas, no more than four if she's remembering right, listening to her parents argue. Only wishing her daddy could stay. Wishing they would stop. Wishing the dance between them, the impossibly intricate steps of their relationship could flatten out into a simple binary: mom and dad, his voice reading the bedtime stories, hers leading the walk to school. Wishing that as a four year old, who couldn't understand.

Her father's voice: _Will you let me be the best judge of that, Andrea?_  
Her mom saying something she can't quite hear.  
_... my brother, Andy!  
... him too, Toby! Only you could be so ... righteous --  
Yeah, well I'm not about to jump ..._  
Her mom's voice, softer, sadder, an undercurrent Molly wasn't sure she wanted to hear: _... exactly what you're doing, Toby, exactly what you're doing_.

He was still angry when he came up to say goodnight. She could feel it, like a surge of electric current in his chest, sparking against her own. She had clung to him, breathed him in - smoke, candy, the rain-soaked air from their trip outside. She remembers trying to be still against his body. She remembers pressing her head down into his shoulder and imagining (probably only imagining) that she could feel his heartbeat: rapid, insistent against the slow breaths he is determinedly taking - in and out - sounding to her like the clatter of his fingers on the keys of his laptop.

It frightened her, but all she knew to do was hold on tighter and hope she might still him, with only her warmth and her featherweight breaths.

She never imagined she would feel that anger herself, cloying, like a hand over her throat. Turned once more against the black thread of melancholy that runs through her family's male line, like a tripwire, like a choke-rope. A long list: her uncle David's excision from the family story; her father's unconscious ability to build high walls out of his sadness, walls not even they could scale. And now her brother's chapter of the tragedy: sharp and perfect, fine lines etched in acid, unexpected, yet not unexpected at all.

Molly wishes, absurdly, like a little girl might, for her mom.

But she had been forced to remove that number from her speed-dial, over three years ago now.

Molly, more like her father than either of them could see, will not understand the draw of the deep black water on her brother. She will have questions to ask her Rabbi when the time comes, and they will all be to do with finding the problem, drawing a red circle around it, cutting it out of the fabric of her brother's life like a bad sentence in a paragraph of good prose. And her Rabbi will tell her that it's okay to be angry and Molly will shake her head and want to say, _no, you don't understand_.

She will believe that she is fine until she gets a sharp thrust of pain in her abdomen, like being shoved into a brick wall, and then realises that she is crying, with her fists crushed up against her mouth. And a little later someone, a friend, will ask, _do you want me to go?_ and Molly will shake her head, just a little but still spraying her hot tears against her cold hands, and clutch his sleeve and feel a strange lightness percolate through her belly, almost like deja vu, almost like an acknowledgement of fate, in which she has never believed.

Later, in her bed alone, on the edge of a sleep which will feel frighteningly like a state from which she cannot wake, she will open her arms around a body no longer there. A small, sharp-shouldered boy, with long black hair. Who shifts and fidgets and kicks out against her thigh. Who murmurs words in his sleep. Whose place in the world has been smoothed out by a long sadness which no-one created and no-one could fix. She will almost be able to feel his weight against her ribcage, curled into the space she has defined. She will have stopped crying; he will have stopped breathing.

Molly will sleep, and wake up. And begin again.


End file.
